Catfish: Texas` Great Catch Has Gotten Away

July 12, 1985|By Betty Cook. Dallas Morning News.

DALLAS — ``I would go so far as to say that it is the finest freshwater fish in America, including pike and carp. It is the equal of most saltwater fish, including lemon or gray sole. Fillets of catfish can be used in almost any recipe calling for a white non-oily fish.``

That was Craig Claiborne in the New York Times in November, 1981. Too late even then, I suppose, but we should have listened.

Wasn`t that, in fact, about the time the trend-watchers were promising us that the fashion passion for all things Texan was dead? Gone the way of all such fevered fads, they claimed. They lied. Look around you in almost any city in the world, and you know what you`ll see: Western hats in Canada, jeans on the Riviera, cowboy boots under the skirts of Arab oilmen. Not as many as when Cutter Bill was the cutting edge of couture, but they`re there--piecemeal, which I find downright disquieting because of what that proves: Texas has been assimilated.

Go ahead, laugh. I`m here to tell you, friends, Texas Independence has gone to hell in a hamper. It wasn`t so bad that we let the merry moneymakers lump us economically with the rest of the Sun Belt states, invade us to reshape our real estate, fool around with our financial equilibrium. We needn`t be too embarrassed that we traded our trademark individuality for the designer uniforms of international glitz; blame it on our hunger to change labels from World Clown to World Class.

Hey, I didn`t even much mind sharing our food--Lord knows, we had enough chili and pinto beans and jalapenos to go around, and most of us could enjoy a sly missionary giggle at seeing black-eyed peas turn up on New York menus, to be reverently savored by the same citizens who used to scorn them as fit only for hog feed. Besides, the food-sharing was mostly a two-way proposition at first. We learned to like their lamb, they got our goat. They showed us Buffalo chicken wings, we taught them barbecue. They fried us squid, and we fried them . . . God help us, we fried them catfish. It wasn`t our first indiscretion, but it was a humdinger. Just because they`d got their busy hands on all our other treasures, did we have to let them have their way as well with the National Fish of Texas?

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``We`d go up on the Llano River where there was a good place to camp out, and we would take the big, black iron pots we washed our clothes in and fill them with homemade lard, and we`d fry up catfish.``

That`s my Aunt Bess, telling me how it used to be done when the catfish cognoscenti were country people. My great-grandfather, Joseph Allen Tompkins, had a certain reputation in his community for bringing home the biggest. He would go down along the river bank where the big cats nested under deep, flat shelves of rock. No sissy bait-and-wait for him--he gigged them with a snapping metal claw on the end of a pole, and 60-pounders were not uncommon. We`re not talking fun sport here; we`re talking serious food.

You know the ancestral memory some dogs have that makes them herd sheep by instinct? Farm-rooted human Texans have that memory for hunting and fishing. My father was two generations past having to survive off game, and he called going after it sport, but he went about it in a manner too serious to be classified as light entertainment.

Craig Claiborne`s catfish memory draws a pretty picture of summer ladies languishing under parasols in little pleasure boats, while their straw-hatted men drop hooks in the lake`s sunlit waters. Claiborne`s mind sees the waters as clear. Maybe so; I doubt it. But then, Craig Claiborne was from

Mississippi.

My own early mental replay sees a boat, all right, and me in it. But the time is twilight, and the craft is a flat-bottomed, awkward tin thing, homemade with no thought for comfort. I am allowed along because I have promised to sit still, endure the mosquitoes and keep my mouth shut (fish can hear). My father, in sweaty khakis, is laying a trotline, a long, heavy cord tied to a tree on the riverbank and hung with many hooks, each on its own short, lighter line. He baits each hook--with a minnow, usually; sometimes with a vile something called stinkbait--and positions a float on the main line above it before dropping it overboard. The water is murky; by the time he finishes, working by flashlight in the dusk turned dark, it is black, and he rows us back to camp in a night gone opaque and shuddery with river-life sounds. (How many miles would I have to go from Dallas to see night that pure again?)